What’s Really Behind the Hagel Fight

Aaron David Miller points out that the bumpy nomination and confirmation process for Chuck Hagel to be the next defense secretary isn’t really about Hagel himself.

“This is really a fight about Barack Obama. It is being driven by three somewhat overlapping constituencies — a pro-Israel community that doesn’t trust the president, a Republican party and a neoconservative elite struggling unsuccessfully to define its own foreign policy identity, and finally, a party in opposition that is determined to remind Obama that, reelected or not, he doesn’t have a free hand.”